Clan history:
"-The burned hand teaches best", The old man said, staring into the fire.
He sat in the clearing around the fire, surrounded by children who watched his every movement with a hunger to hear more apparent in their eyes.
In the middle of the village, at the foot of their great volcano.
He pointed up at that volcano.
"I was a young man when I came to this place, leading my people from the conflicts of the dust and the ash."
His eyes drifted off into memory.
"I remember the struggles of my people. How we were forced to fight for small, meager scraps of territory in this war. How we all decided to desert."
"The King of The Sands was furious when he heard of our revolt, but by then, it was too late for him to take action."
"We fled. Carrying supplies, food and water hastily stolen from the camps, we ran across the Land of the Haze, never stopping.
We knew that those who stayed behind would die.
That spurred us on, even when it seemed our bones would break and our muscles would tear from the very fabric of our bodies.
It was in this fashion we ran for days on end, without stop.
Sometimes people fell to the ground. We left them.
I hope, deep in my heart, that they died quickly.
By the time we reached the great red desert, half of us were left.
Women carrying children, men carrying supplies,
we had made it to the border of the great red desert, with sands the color of blood.
Nobody had ever crossed here. We knew nothing of what awaited us beyond this point.
And so we continued.
Eventually, we began looking for water.
Oases. Plants.
Something.
The old man reached into the fruit bowl sitting by his side on the bench and picked out an orange.
"People needed to eat. But there was nothing there.
Eventually, people started dying.
And then we started eyeing each other.
I feared it would all end there.
But then we reached the volcano.
We looked up at it, huge, imposing.
Our fatherly shadow.
And in the shadow of the mountain, we found food.
Plants, growing in a fertile valley near the apocalyptic mountain. A stream, bringing us water from underground..
And we ate. And we drank. We were so happy to be alive..
Eventually... People began fearing that there were natives here who would begrudge us this land. And they looked at the mountain with fear.".
The old man looked up at the mountain.
"I was sent up to investigate if there was anything on the mountain.
It was a difficult climb. At times I hiked up steep earth, at others climbed stone..
The rocks tore my flesh and the baked dirt seared my skin.
But at last, I made it to the top.
It was nightfall when I made it there.
There was nothing but a huge, smooth-sided peak.
I was tired.
I knelt, there in the shadow of that peak.
And then, I felt it.
A rumbling...beneath my feet.
I don't know what the people down at the bottom felt.
But as it came up to the peak, just beneath me
...I still feel it, that inspiration for our people's war chants.
The drums, symbolic of the volcano's rumbling
And then the peak of the mountain EXPLODED.
And out came fire.
I was thrown onto my back.
Luckily, this was absolutely nothing compared to what could have happened, only a small eruption.
The flames reached into the sky.
I still remember the heat, searing my face.
But it was beautiful, the fire against the night sky.
It was there that our people was born.
Gazing at that fire in the sky.
Red against black.
Fire against darkness.
We would be that fire. An eternal flame, standing steadfast against the wild darkness that would attempt to smother it.
I remembered being told the story of Agni as a child.
How he gave us fire, and life.
In that moment, that volcano became our Agni.
It had given us food, in the valley born in it's shadow.
And it was here
that our courage was born. For who would dare assault the people of the volcano?
And so, eventually our village was built. The rest, is history."
The old man stood up, amid the pleas of children to finish the story.
He smiled. "Not tonight, children. It is time I rested."
The children began to scatter and leave as he walked away.
But at the back, two shinobi watched in silence.
Sareko was tall and thin, with black hair and scarlet eyes.
He had dark skin, a sign of his ancestry
from the people of the Volcano.
Sitting cross-legged beside him was his friend.
6 years younger than him, Chikaze had pale skin,
with brown hair in several scattered shades.
His eyes were also red, showing his more distant relation but sure to the people of Kazangakure.
Sareko stood up and stretched, ignoring the other children's
reproving glares as he walked through the crowd.
Chikaze followed him.
"Sareko! Why are we leaving?"
Sareko shook his head in disgust.
"That old man is speaking nonsense.
There's no such thing as gods!"
Chikaze stared. "No such thing?"
"Yes!" Sareko kept walking through the streets of Kazangakure,
away from the clearing.
"If there were gods, would our world be in the state it is now?
Eleven different shinobi nations, unwilling to stand with each other! Eleven, Chikaze!"
*And*, he thought, *if there were gods... My friend...*
"But Sareko!" Chikaze protested.
"Who says that the gods are gone?
They might be doing everything they can and we just don't know it!"
Sareko stopped and glared at Chikaze.
"Then they aren't doing enough. If they're so powerful, if they want to help us so badly,
why don't they just force all of the nations to unite? Why don't they just strike down
out [i]enemies[/i] , with their godly power? Bring peace to this torn and bleeding world?"
Chikaze was silent. Slowly, Sareko realized that he had been shouting.
"I'm.... I'm sorry, Chikaze. I..."
He looked around and noticed other people in the street watching him now.
Sareko turned back to Chikaze, who was also looking at him now.
"I'm... I have to think for a while."
He turned and leaped into the evening sky, streaking across the rooftops.
Night had fallen, and Sareko sat at the foot of the red mountain that was their home.
He stared up at it.
Supposedly, the great mound protected their village against enemy incursions.
Personally, he thought it was just a pile of dung.
He spoke to the mountain. "If you're so great and strong,
why don't you ever just erupt, like volcanos are supposed to?"
Although, if it did, that might lead to the magma flooding Kazangakure.
*That would be bad*, he thought dryly.
He looked up at the night sky.
[i]Akaihono...[/i]
“It had been a long time…” he thought,
but the pain remained fresh in his mind every time he remembered it.
[b][i]If the gods were real, then they would have saved my friend.[/i][/b]
If only that stupid civil war had never been started
If only...Tears began to well up in his eyes, but he forced them back.
He stood up, shaking his head.
"If you were real, then you would have done SOMETHING!" He screamed at the violet skies.
"You wouldn't have let our world descend into violence like this!
You would have guided us, like you were supposed to!
If you knew that this would happen, why didn't you just destroy us
and spare yourselves the pain of watching us slowly kill ourselves?!"
Tears streaming down his face, he raged at the night air.
Then, slowly, he calmed down, until he was silent once more.
Not bothering to wipe the tears from his face, he stared at the mountain and asked,
"Akaihono, what do I do?"
He remembered how Akaihono had lost his clan, just like him.
He wondered if... he could bring it back.
He was shocked. Rebuild his clan? It seemed a ridiculous idea.
And then the mountain of Kazangakure exploded.
Sareko felt the ground rumbling beneath him,
heard the trembling roar of the stone mound,
had only a moment's warning before
the peak of Kazangakure's guardian mountain exploded
and the sky lit up like the sun had suddenly returned.
The beautiful crimson magma, streaking into the sky. The fire, flying upwards, the sky,
imprinted behind it.
And then it was gone. The fire in the sky dissipating, what
little remained flowing down the sides of the mountain,
vanishing into the night.
Sareko, stunned, remembered Akaihono.
The next day, the entire village was aflame with talk
of the last night's eruption. Thankfully,
it had been a small one, so nobody had been hurt.
Chikaze was wandering through the village, looking at the stalls and vendors,
when he saw Sareko sitting with his feet dangling off the edge of a rooftop.
He stared at the sky, a small smile on his lips.
“I have an idea, Chikaze.” Sareko said.
“An idea, that will carry on Akaihono’s legacy, my beliefs, all with the help of the [i]gods[/i].”
Astound, Chikaze asked “What brought about this change?”
[b][i][size=30pt]"Agni"[/size][/i][/b]
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